On this plan, students would be required to read Balthasar's Origen: Spirit and Fire (Catholic University of America Press), Exhortation to Martyrdom (Classics of Western Spirituality series), Song of Songs, Commentary and Homilies (Ancient Christian Writers series), and Commentary on the Gospel according to John, Volume 1(Fathers of the Church series).

I am still in two minds about whether to use Balthasar's anthology or Origen's First Principles. I am habitually averse to anthologies, and it makes obvious sense to stick with First Principles. But the Balthasar volume is so rich in content, and so artful in arrangement, that I suspect it would serve students better than First Principles, especially as preparation for reading the commentaries in the later weeks of the course. Origen's distinctive blend of exegesis, doctrine, and spirituality is still present in First Principles, but it's much more pronounced and more visible in Balthasar's anthology. The worst mistake for students approaching Origen for the first time would be to assume a division between something called "theology" (in First Principles) and something called "exegesis" (in the commentaries), and, perhaps, a third thing called "spirituality" (in On Prayer etc).

What do you think, reader? Have any of you done a course like this? Any ideas for improvement? Any suggestions regarding the choice of texts?

I leave you with an amazingly apt and vivid description of Origen from Balthasar's introduction to Spirit and Fire (pp. 2-3):

He himself hardly ever wrote, but dictated, practically day and night, tirelessly, to a team of stenographers. Thus his works ... are really only the sound of a voice. But it is a voice that drives straight through everything, ... with a cool, unapproachable intellectual restraint that has never again been equalled. It is not the voice of a rhetorician ..., for this voice is not even trying to persuade; nor is it the enthusiastic voice of a poet ...; it is too brittle, too dry and plain for that, even to the point of poverty.... Everything here is unpremeditated, unforced, and expressed with a modesty that never ceases to amaze.... Not a trace of the Augustinian pathos which, without asking, breaks open the doors of the heart.... But no less distant is the sagacious and, in the best sense of the word, humanistic balance of the great pastoral bishop Basil. The voice of the Alexandrian is more like that glowing, rainless desert wind that sometimes
sweeps over the Nile delta, with a thoroughly unromantic passion: pure,
fiery gusts. Two names come to mind in comparison: Heraclitus and
Nietzsche. For their work too is, externally, ashes and contradiction,
and makes sense only because of the fire of their souls which forces
their unmanageable material into a unity and, with a massive consumption
of fuel, leaves behind a fiery track straight across the earth. Their
passion, however, stems only from the Dionysian mystery of the world.
But here, in Origen, the flame shoots out and darts upward to the
mystery of the super-worldly Logos-WORD which fills the face of the earth only to be itself baptized in this fire, to be ignited and transformed into the Spirit.